Anatomy of Failed Design: Vampire

[Prak]

That doesn't necessarily mean that they couldn't still exist... I mean, I could totally see static undead megalomaniacs holding onto their labels and schemes while the underlings just get on getting on and the youngest vampires basically ignore the entire existence of the sects unless they're talking to some ultra-conservative authority figure.

[hyzmarca]

It may. I know it's more potent, and I seem to recall that is has psychological effects of some kind, but more specifically than that, I don't know.

---

So, lets say you wanted to run a game of Vampire the Masquerade because the person you're going out with is interested in it. And because you don't want to come off as a condescending jackass by effectively saying "no, no, I know a much better game, we'll use that instead" you want to give running the actual WW VtM game a go. It also will act as a bit of an object example for the failed design stuff you've told them about, and let them decide for themselves whether it's a game they want to put up with or port the interesting bits of into a better system.

So, obviously there needs to be some kind of goal to hang characters around. The latest Girl Genius and a bit from AS has me thinking about setting up the game such that the players get enlisted by a small group that lives in the metaphysical after image of the Library of Alexandria and have taken as their purpose maintaining that library with copies of every new book that is written. Most books are acquired very simply by just ordering them from publishers, but this allows you to send the coterie off on quests to acquire particularly special books.

But, other than that quick premise that works for a single group (or as the conceit for a whole new game...), or the Vampire Homesteading thing, what would be workable default motivations for a game about vampires that could be sort of house-fluffed into a VtM game?

I've had a few ideas for a game.

One is vampire Scooby Doo. The PCs are nomads who ride around the country in a Volkswagen van, never staying in one place too long, solving mysteries and getting into adventures everywhere they go. One of the important points of Chargen would be that they're all friends. They know each other before the game starts and don't need any special reason to stick together,.

Another is to have everyone be recently embraced by a giant troll. They wake up together in a warehouse with video tapped instructions about what they are and the local politics. They'd all be Caitiffs. Without a sire to vouch for them they'd be on a lot of shitlists from the start. They'd be blood bound to each other and Dominated into being loyal to each other while unconscious, so they have reason to work together. None of them would be able to take the Generation merit, since they all have the same set generation, due to having the same sire. They wouldn't be told what their generation is, and the GM would handle blood pools, but they'd be able to find out though in game methods.

The punchline is that their generation is 2.

Sabbat Pack could work. I'd need to read up on the whole antitribu thing.

As far as Camarilla v. Sabbat- I know it's not what the books posit, but what about a refluff where the Sabbat and Cam. were in a kill on sight feud centuries ago, but have since cooled things to a detached civility. Maybe they basically say "As long as you don't go Grand Hunt in our city/As long as you don't try to enforce your rules in our territory, we don't much care about you" That would at least make politics slightly more interesting than "Sorry, just saw a Brujah/Follower of Set, gotta go kill that guy, then we can get back to discussing feeding rights," make mixed coteries possible, and allow for interesting "Now, my Camarilla friend here isn't allowed to [whatever], happily, I'm from the Sabbat, and he's turned his back, so maybe you'd like to cooperate?"

As written, the factions are defined by Camarilla being the vampire pyramid scheme and Sabbat being the "fuck the Camarilla" faction. You have to come up with some actual goals and ideologies for the sects, because if the sects aren't fighting each other, then I don't know what the fuck they doing and what the difference between being a member of each would be.

They'd still be at war with each other. It just wouldn't be of such a level that civility was impossible. A Sabbat vampire in a Camarilla city would be able to count on local hospitality unless he starts shit. And the other way around, too.

As PCs, you are almost certainly going to be starting shit, in which case all bets are off.

[Maxus]

That doesn't necessarily mean that they couldn't still exist... I mean, I could totally see static undead megalomaniacs holding onto their labels and schemes while the underlings just get on getting on and the youngest vampires basically ignore the entire existence of the sects unless they're talking to some ultra-conservative authority figure.

Sounds like joining up would be like getting a job. Complete with interviews.

"What we really want to know if is what unique skills you bring to the Sabbat."

"I'm very vindictive and patient and have no trouble...arranging matters. A guy stole my boyfriend so I made him fall down four flights of stairs by using a light coating of vaseline on three steps and pulling a fire alarm. I also know many ingenious traps with various grades of monofilament fishing line."

"Sneaky. How are you on languages?"

"I....took Latin in high school. Forty years ago."

"Well! I have to say you're a promising applicant. Tell me about the fishing line traps, and if I like what I hear your application is going to the top of the pile."

[Longes]

Sabbat Pack could work. I'd need to read up on the whole antitribu thing.

As far as Camarilla v. Sabbat- I know it's not what the books posit, but what about a refluff where the Sabbat and Cam. were in a kill on sight feud centuries ago, but have since cooled things to a detached civility. Maybe they basically say "As long as you don't go Grand Hunt in our city/As long as you don't try to enforce your rules in our territory, we don't much care about you" That would at least make politics slightly more interesting than "Sorry, just saw a Brujah/Follower of Set, gotta go kill that guy, then we can get back to discussing feeding rights," make mixed coteries possible, and allow for interesting "Now, my Camarilla friend here isn't allowed to [whatever], happily, I'm from the Sabbat, and he's turned his back, so maybe you'd like to cooperate?"

As written, the factions are defined by Camarilla being the vampire pyramid scheme and Sabbat being the "fuck the Camarilla" faction. You have to come up with some actual goals and ideologies for the sects, because if the sects aren't fighting each other, then I don't know what the fuck they doing and what the difference between being a member of each would be.

They'd still be at war with each other. It just wouldn't be of such a level that civility was impossible. A Sabbat vampire in a Camarilla city would be able to count on local hospitality unless he starts shit. And the other way around, too.

As PCs, you are almost certainly going to be starting shit, in which case all bets are off.

I still don't see how this works out. In real Cold War the sides were separated from each other by oceans and had a massive number of civilians to fight over and convert to capitalism/communism. Very notably, USSR soldiers and US soldiers didn't sit together in Cuba touching butts and sharing war stories. But with both Camarilla and the Sabbat both sides consist entirely of soldiers, and the Sabbat has "Fuck Camarilla" as their only goal. Like, what's the Sabbat's motivation for peaceful cohabitation with the Camarilla in a single city? What is the Camarilla's reason for allowing a Sabbat vampire to start establishing a stronghold in their territory when they know that the Sabbat's end goal is the destruction of Camarilla?

[Prak]

I was under the impression that they wouldn't be sharing cities. You'd have Sabbat territories and Camarilla cities, and you can visit the rival, but you're not going to have little Sabbat ghettoes in Cam cities or Cam manors in Sabbat territories.

[hyzmarca]

I still don't see how this works out. In real Cold War the sides were separated from each other by oceans and had a massive number of civilians to fight over and convert to capitalism/communism. Very notably, USSR soldiers and US soldiers didn't sit together in Cuba touching butts and sharing war stories. But with both Camarilla and the Sabbat both sides consist entirely of soldiers, and the Sabbat has "Fuck Camarilla" as their only goal. Like, what's the Sabbat's motivation for peaceful cohabitation with the Camarilla in a single city? What is the Camarilla's reason for allowing a Sabbat vampire to start establishing a stronghold in their territory when they know that the Sabbat's end goal is the destruction of Camarilla?

Basically an extension of old-school hospitality rules. If your enemy shows up at the door in need of a place to stay, you give him food and a bed for the day. But you keep an eye on him, and if he breaks his guest obligations you stake him and set him on fire.

[Username17]

Anatomy of Failed Design
Vampire: the Masquerade

part of the vampire aging process is that eventually you can't gain blood points from animals, and then eventually you can't get them from humans and have to get them from vampires instead, and then if you go far enough down the line you can't get them from just any vampire and have to get them from super old and/or low generation vampires.

That's only explicitly a thing in nWoD. It's a very good idea, but that was an effect of the Blood Potency rules. And that's as good a time as any to talk about...

The War of Ages



A central theme of Masquerade is supposed to be a power struggle between different vampire interest groups delineated by power. I've never seen this done well and most real world games don't even try to use it. It's fucked up in so many ways that we're gonna devote an entire post to it.

All Those Stupid Words



Vampire has a lot of stupid words. The glossary is quite long and isn't even complete. Mostly we make fun of them for stupid discipline and bloodline names, but we make joke disciplines with names like “Obscurica” because the stupid bloodline and discipline names are game terms that we can't really get away from. All those words like “Jyhad” (pronounced “Jai-had” not like the actual word “jihad”) don't get made fun of because they aren't used at all.

Now making catch phrases is hard. Joss Whedon movies are very quotable, but a lot of lines in Buffy and The Avengers are not things that you'd say. There's no shame in trying and failing to meme push in-world terminology. Shadowrun managed to get some people to say “Frag” but I don't think anyone really said “slitch.” Nightlife got people to say “Rinse and Floss” but didn't get people to say “Butt It.” And so on and so forth. The problem with Vampire's gibberish terminology is that there aren't really words you can use to talk about these things without the in-world terminology. So if you don't end up using the provided terminology because it's klunky, vaguely racist, or just plain stupid sounding, you're left basically just not talking about the context at all.

But the real problem here is that the terms just didn't mean things that made sense. A Methusela was 4th generation, but an Ancilla was 150 years old. There supposed to be different teams in the war of ages defined by these groupings, but the terms didn't mean the same things. How can an age group be opposed to a generation, when everyone's a fucking immortal and there are members of each generation that are also members of each age group? Masquerade failed to make these groups have explicable goals, but beyond that it failed to make these groups be exclusive enough for group goals to be a thing you could grasp or explain.

Age, Power, and, Generation



Generations from Caine was just really fucking dumb. It was an immutable marker of power that was entirely dependent on shit that happened before the character was ever a vampire. You could be a 1000 year old bad ass but part of the 12th generation and still always suck (in a bad way) compared to some asshole upstart whose first taste of blood was from some other 7th generation asshole five years ago. The idea was that we were doing Anne Rice, so drinking powerful blood was supposed to make you more powerful. But the entire “only the first drop counts” thing was super bullshit all over the place. It created all kinds of perverse incentives like using your defeated enemies to sire your own offspring. Your childer had no reason to be “your clan” and should logically just be the clan of whatever the last boss villain you defeated.

Similarly, the diablerie mechanics were so bad that they what they encouraged was not for you to drink the soul of your defeated enemy, but to string them up and use their blood to turn a couple other helpless victims and then drink their souls and only then drink the soul of the dude you were nominally pissed at in the first place. The fact that you only gained one generation for murder fucking someone with a better generation than you, but that the blood of someone with a better generation could always be used to make a new vamp with a generation only one worse than theirs was simply conceptual failure at its hardest.

What's going on here is that we're (poorly) duplicating Anne Rice tropes. In the Anne Rice novels, your blood gets more potent over time, but it also gets more potent faster if you drink the blood of someone with more potent blood. Now doing things exactly like Anne Rice would be a nightmare without a computer. We're talking about something that's supposed to kick in over hundreds or thousands of years with every sip along the way contributing based on how awesome the blood was. Obviously you can't do that justice in a tabletop or LARP game, but equally obviously having distinct points with permanent and difference engineable power effects is prone to abuse and doesn't actually provide the Rician flavor you're obviously looking for.

One of the few ideas that nWoD had that wasn't unsalvageable crap was the Blood Potency. Your blood just gradually got more potent as you aged, and you could also spend XPs to raise your Blood Potency. The end. That actually does the job well enough. Not perfectly, because we still haven't gotten a way to communicate to the players that the characters want to be drinking the blood of elder vampires rather than whatever hobo blood they are drinking at the moment. But that brings us to our next problem: Blood Bonding.

Who is Sucking Who?


Meh. Close enough.

Vampire had this idea of vampire blood being addictive to drink. That vampires could enslave not only normal people but other vampires by getting them to drink their blood. This ultimately all has to do with the thing where Dracula forces Mina to drink blood out of his chest, but there's a bunch of kinky blood sex games in Anne Rice and other source material along the way. It's a neat image and blood bonding was an important part of the setting. It is, however, terrible for the setting.

Vampires drink blood. It's a thing they do. Vampires need to be drinking blood from people to assert their dominance. If drinking blood from someone is a submissive gesture, then we are severely unmoored. What are vampires supposed to be doing to normal people then? Using their magic powers and vampiric sexiness to run around submitting to everyone in town? What the fuck?

It also puts a huge crimp in the stories we can tell about elders throwing their weight around. If they in fact do not want to drink your blood, why do they care about you at all? The whole point was that vitae was supposed to be a thing you wanted, but if drinking it causes submission and dependency, obviously no one does. That is completely fucking wrong.


At step two, Mina is already under his power.

Dracula owns your ass because he drank from you three times, not the other way around. Feeding you his heart blood is a way to infect you with vampirism, not to dominate you. The domination was already accomplished before he even takes off his shirt.

The entire blood bonding shit is backwards. It should be that vampires who drink from you three times make you their bitch. This would allow the elders to want and need to drink from lower tier vampires, which would encourage Dracula to keep his wives around, explain why powerful vampires make new vampires in general, explain why younger vampires feel afraid of and oppressed by the older vampires and so on and so forth. Really, so many things would work so much better if the blood bond was caused by fang kissing someone on three different nights. You could even have the blood of vampires be a thing you wanted to drink so that you wouldn't have to constantly tell players that their character wanted to drink shit that the player absolutely did not want their character to touch.

Gehenna

The idea of Gehenna was a bit of Christian millennialism that sort of shat all over the Vampire metaplot. The idea was that the end of the world was coming and you might be in the Final Nights. Which was supposed to give a bit of immediacy to everything, but mostly just badly undermined the immortality theme. If the world is going to end in less than 40 years, whether you age or not is really not all that important.

The deal was that Antediluvians (3rd generation vampires from 6000 years ago) were going to wake up and go all Queen of the Damned on people. And that was going to be the end of the world, because they were super hard core 6000 years ago. This is a failure of theme on a bunch of levels.

Firstly, old vampires waking up and this being a problem is something that only makes sense if you've fixed the blood bond issue and you actually have the expectation that older vampires are going to want to drink your blood. If the blood of weaker vampires is something that stronger vampires avoid like herpes hotpockets, then there's no reason for higher tier vampires to give a second fuck about the doings of lower level vampires and thus the great awakening should be visited by a collective yawn.

But secondly, the whole “ancient power” thing only makes sense if you posit that people are gaining power over time. The ancients are powerful now because they are 6000 years old and have been growing in power. If the presentation is instead that they were world floobifying badasses back then, then history just doesn't make any sense. It's a failure to understand the entire thought process behind ancient powers being at all relavent.

And of course there's the somewhat minor issue that the Noah's Flood shit is shit and you should be ashamed of yourself for writing that YEC garbage into a game.

The ancient vampires preparing to awaken from the sleep of ages and issue in a reign of terror where they eat a whole bunch of younger vampires is totally awesome. But by having that actually end the setting, it loses any narrative power. And of course, all the details were shit. If you were going to make a vampire game that wasn't stupid, the threat of the awakening elders should be there, but it should be different in almost every respect from what V:tM actually delivered.

[hyzmarca]

Generation does do one very important thing. It gives you a reason to eat your elders. Now, your elders will tell you that this is the most immoral thing you can possibly do and it's punishable by death. But they tell you that because they're the ones who you're going to eat. After you eat them, you'll probably tell the lower generation vampires the same thing.

It seriously gives your PCs a good motivation to go highlander on the lower generation vampires.

It also gives you a mechanic that lets you level up after beating the boss.

[Mechalich]

But you don't actually need a special motivation to eat your elders. There's a built in motivation that your elders already have all the power, sex, and wealth that you want, and because they are immortal vampires and will never die, the only way that you get any of that shit is by backstabbing them, blaming it on someone else, and taking it. The whole soul-drinking aspect is completely unnecessary.

The whole 'Gehenna is coming bit' provides a motive to locate the hiding places of the sleeping elders, decapitate their torpid forms, and take their stuff (and there's actually a minor faction buried somewhere in one of the books that does that). There are a lot of ways to make this highly interesting and a major plot point for VtM games, but Vampire never did much with them.

Its also incredibly embarrassing that the one time WW found it in themselves to wake up an antediluvian and have him/her go all queen of the damned they farmed out responsibility for dealing with the whole thing to a bunch of Keui-Jin and the Technocracy, which shows how little agency the kindred actually had in the WoD overall.

[hyzmarca]

But you don't actually need a special motivation to eat your elders. There's a built in motivation that your elders already have all the power, sex, and wealth that you want, and because they are immortal vampires and will never die, the only way that you get any of that shit is by backstabbing them, blaming it on someone else, and taking it. The whole soul-drinking aspect is completely unnecessary.

The whole 'Gehenna is coming bit' provides a motive to locate the hiding places of the sleeping elders, decapitate their torpid forms, and take their stuff (and there's actually a minor faction buried somewhere in one of the books that does that). There are a lot of ways to make this highly interesting and a major plot point for VtM games, but Vampire never did much with them.

Its also incredibly embarrassing that the one time WW found it in themselves to wake up an antediluvian and have him/her go all queen of the damned they farmed out responsibility for dealing with the whole thing to a bunch of Keui-Jin and the Technocracy, which shows how little agency the kindred actually had in the WoD overall.

Heck, the canon Gehenna scenario doesn't have the Antediluvians rise up and eat everyone. The canon Gehenna scenario is Wormwood. In which God says "fuck it" and just smites all the really powerful vampires. And it's not even a fun Revelations smite, with Jesus ridding down with a giant blazing sword to chop off vampire heads. It's just every vampire systematically dropping dead for no apparent reason. And the only thing the PCs can do is die. They can't fight. They can't hide. They can't survive. The entire scenario is the PC coterie just waiting around for an omnipotent being to murder them, do not pass go, do not collect $200. And in the end an omnipotent being murders them.

[Chamomile]

Not quite. You hide in a church while all the other vampires in the world are murdered, a handful of tiny adventure hooks (like "a light in the shape of the ankh falls on one of the characters, expect people to actually care about and discuss what that might mean"), and then at the end the Storyteller picks which PCs he's decided have sucked his dick enough to be turned human again and everyone else gets dusted.

[hyzmarca]

Not quite. You hide in a church while all the other vampires in the world are murdered, a handful of tiny adventure hooks (like "a light in the shape of the ankh falls on one of the characters, expect people to actually care about and discuss what that might mean"), and then at the end the Storyteller picks which PCs he's decided have sucked his dick enough to be turned human again and everyone else gets dusted.

Yes. I just read over that scenario again. One thing that really strikes me is a tiny adventure hook called Who Do You Choose? One of your enemies has kidnapped two of your mortal friends, and sent a messenger to you saying that he'll Embrace one and let the other go, and you have to make Sophie's Choice.

The thing that gets me is that it says

Remember that neither the character nor this kindred have any reason to know that those affected by wormwood can no longer embrace a childe. If they do, there is really no great threat here.

Now, it's possible that the person writing this forgot the mechanics for the Embrace involve draining all of someone's blood. But I don't think this is the case. In any case, a crazy vampire has kidnapped two of your friends and is threatening to kill one. And this is not a great threat.


And it isn't just that you become mortal. You also become completely invincible at the end, if you're deemed worthy. You can die of natural old age, but that's it. Nothing can harm you and any attempt to do violence to you will rebound and hit your attacker 7 fold.

And the best thing, this is irrevocable. And it applies to all of your descendants.

This could segue into an extremely depraved mortal hunter campaign, where you fuck over all the remaining supernatural sonspiricies with your irrevocable God-Given invincibility, conquer the entire world, and create an eternal empire for perversion and corruption ruled by your dynasty, which God can do nothing about because he made a rather stupid promise to you.

[Koumei]

Did any of the other game line "End of the World" books have better outcomes? Was even a single one not completely shit? Which was the worst?

[hyzmarca]

Did any of the other game line "End of the World" books have better outcomes? Was even a single one not completely shit? Which was the worst?

Hunter

Now, Hunter didn't actually have an end of the world scenario, since it was in the Time of Judgement book with all the other minor gamelines and there wasn't pagecount for an actual scenario. It's all just hooks that the GM can use to build a scenario.

But, uniquely among the World of Darkness games, those hooks do not contain or rely on giant penis NPCs. The PCs actually do thing and drive the story. Exactly what that thing they do is left very vague, but it's supposed to be important.

First of all, they get the power to turn monsters back into normal humans somehow. There are no game mechanics for this, it just says either a serum or a power, whichever the Storyteller prefers. What it amounts to is that you can turn vampires and werewolves and everything else into normal humans, and send Wraiths to heaven or wherever, maybe (if you're zapping monsters with magic light from your butt, it works, if you're injecting them with drugs, Wraiths have a problem.

So first off, the PCs get a game breaking power that makes them both relevant and central to the end of the world plot.

Second, you're allowed and even encouraged to turn your tiny hunter group into a global organization by shattering all of the masquerades and engaging in mass recruitment.

Third, the ST is instructed that the PCs should change the world.

The book doesn't define changing the world very well, but it give some examples. Like violently overthrowing the American government and driving out the vampire cabals/technocrat mages that once controlled it.

When they say change the world, they mean that your PCs should personally do things that have huge and long-lasting global impact.

So that's good.

It's still not an actual scenario. It's a list of ideas for a scenario. But those ideas involve the PCs being important and kicking major ass. So it's better than literally every other gameline ending scenario, which all have the PCs as passive observers or cannon fodder minions while the big penis NPCs do things.

[Username17]

The New White Wolf was asked which Time of Judgement scenarios were going to be canon moving forward (since the premise is that the Apocalypse/Gehenna actually did happen during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan). And they said "None of them."

They put a bunch of obsessively fannish Scandinavians in a room and asked them to brainstorm how they could continue a plotline from any of the presented scenarios and they couldn't think of anything for any of them. So they are going to make a new Time of Judgement scenario that takes less of a dump on the setting.

-Username17

[Longes]

Wormwood was the worst because the entire 'adventure' was that you sit in a church for two months watching paint dry. And the messenger of god is a vampire serial killer with Humanity 9 and True Faith 9 who will kill your ass if you so much as say "heck".

The other scenarios were better, but only because the railroad showed you scenery instead of being a loop in a grey room. But you are basically a spectator in every scenario because Antideluvians are better than you. The endings are also bizarre shit. If [Lasombra] wins a scenario, the he becomes a giant shadow, envelops the Earth causing a small ice age, and mysteriously disappears two months later. That's the ending.

[Mechalich]

Did any of the other game line "End of the World" books have better outcomes? Was even a single one not completely shit? Which was the worst?

The core mage scenario, Judgment, is just as bat-shit-crazy as you might expect from Mage, but it does let the PCs do some balls-to-the-walls gonzo stuff while the world is ending, including fusion with alien soul entities, mass arete gain, a massive war with the Technocracy inside/melded with the Dreamtime, the barrier to the spirit world completely collapsing, and marching up on Voormas (Mage's most dickish big dick NPC villain) on freaking Pluto to wreck his face (though you don't actually get to kill him).

And then the End of Evangelion happens (not a summary or a joke, that is literally the ending).

As usual, Mage brutally trumps all the other settings in that there is no Earth left at all when its over. Surviving chosen Vampires and Werewolves presumably ascend/fuse along with everyone else but none of what they did matters at all. If the Mages fail, Voormas turns the universe into the Cancerverse and everyone else is just as permascrewed.

Anyway, it's better than Wormwood, and it's certain an epic plotline, if totally incoherent. I suppose it might be fun to play - if you could actually assemble a group sufficiently versed in Mage's complex lore to actually make sense of any of it - but it would be a lot faster and easier to just watch End of Evangelion again.

[Prak]

Demon the Fallen got it's scenarios in the same book as Hunter, and they were basically-

• The Earthbound Rise in Cooperation! Do you join them for a chance at rewards on a subjugated Earth, or do you fight them, and maybe win a ruined earth and a human race near extinction!?
• You Killed a Really Powerful Earthbound! Your reward is a new boss who wants to push you to eradicate all the others! Basically some overlord or baron of Hell makes it through, looks around, and say "You guys! PCs! You just killed some big lovecraftian fuck. Join me! We will go slay more! Then it's basically about revealing the existence of the fallen to humanity and maybe becoming shepherds of it.
• Alright You Fuckers, Recess is Over! Lucifer shows up with an army of mortal followers and tries to drive all demons, Fallen and Earthbound alike, into Hell to "protect Earth from the fruits of his rebellion" and crawl back to God's lap for an apologetic blowjob win redemption.

It's really weird to me how focused on the Earthbound the scenarios seem to me, since the main book doesn't mention them at all. At some point WW realized that they shipped DtF with the same problem that Vampire had, a complete lack of default character motivations, and started pushing the Earthbound as the primary enemy against which fallen should strive. Demon was a weird mix of stuff from Vampire, Werewolf and a bit of Mage, and was basically the closest WW got to printing something that just said "Ok, ok, we were wrong. Games kind of benefit from being about murderhobos and trapped lairs."

[Username17]

The demographics really do inhibit clan function though. VtM postulates 1 vampire in 100,000 humans to avoid putting strain on things through feeding (Frank has shown this is actually a way higher density than probably sustainable given the mechanics). That creates vast weirdness.

Vampire has a huge problem in that, depending on where you are, the Vampiric society is vastly different. Let's take three cities just in New York State. The New York City metro area has 23 million people in it, so it has over 200 vampires in residence. It probably has a powerful prince, a robust primogen, and clan might have two dozen members and real internal politics. All the crap about vampiric society that VtM talks about works in New York City.

Now take Rochester, New York. It's metro has 1.2 million people, so it has 12 vampires. Assuming it only has members of the core 7 Cam clans, each one has basically 2 members: your sire and you. The Prince can run the city pretty much by himself with some ghoul flunkies to carry messages, there's no primogen, and most of the supposed offices are meaningless. There's still a vampire conspiracy and you could tell interesting stories about it - for one person - but if you drop a coterie of 4 into the city suddenly they're 33% of the vampire populace.

Going further, the metro area of Utica, New York, has 300,000 residents. It's got 3 vampires in total. What the fuck are you going to do with that?

VtM's setup really only 'works' in a very small number of super-sized cities with say, 5 million of more residents. There's only ~50 of those globally

Well, we absolutely have to assume an uneven distribution of vampires, which ultimately makes things a bit weirder.

There are 310 million people in the United States, which gives us an assumed number of vampires around 3,100. But let us also consider a fourth metropolitan area in New York: Elmira. The Elmira-Corning combined statistical area has a bit over 90,000 people in. And more than likely it has no vampires at all. The existence of places like Elmira, New York (and Sterling, IL; and Bozeman, MN; and Huntsville, AL; and so on and so forth) means that there are actually quite a few vampires floating around to bolster the undead populations of places like New Orleans and Washington DC to be able to support the primogen councils and intrigue and shit that V:tM asks of its cities.

But they also mean that there is just really a lot of unclaimed space. The number of people required to keep a vampire alive is measured in the hundreds, so a coterie of vampires could live in a town of just ten to twenty thousand people. Four or five vampires could get by in Spencer, Iowa or Zapata, Texas as long as they quickly took over city institutions and didn't leave a trail of bodies and had memory modification magic on tap. But the expected number of vampires in those cities is zero. In fact, the chances of there being a vampire in those 16k townships are considerably less than one in six. There is literally nothing stopping a group of vampires from homesteading a new domain because the vast majority of marginal cities simply have no vampires in them.

And it doesn't even have to be bullshit areas. There are probably some pretty big places that simply have not been claimed by anyone. The average vampire population of Fresno, California is 11 vampires based on its population of 1.1 million. But as we've established the actual vampire distribution of vampires in any metropolitan area is considerably higher or lower than its proportional population average. Maybe Fresno is running like 20-30 vampires and has some cliques and power struggles going on. But at least equally likely, it's one of the under populated areas. Seriously, if you were a California vampire, don't you think you'd go hang out in San Fransico or LA or Sunnydale? If Fresno is one of the majority of places that has less than its share of vampires, it could very plausibly haze zero vampires. A coterie of vampires could straight up homestead a city with more than a million people in it.

Vampire the Masquerade gave no thought at all to what colonizing a city as a group of vampires would be like. And similarly gave no thought to what vampire society would look like in the rural and micropolitan areas where you could count the number of vampires on the fingers of your hand if there was more one or even any at all.

The basic assumption is that you are playing in Chicago, and when you ask what things look like in Tulsa, you get blank stares. And when you ask what things look like in Duluth, you hit a stop codon.

-Username17

[Longes]

And then the End of Evangelion happens (not a summary or a joke, that is literally the ending).

This is also the ending of Vampire's "Fair is Foul" scenario if [Tzimisce] wins. He merges with everything alive on the planet and flies into space to find more lifeforms to devour.

[Koumei]

Prak: an Earthbound features heavily (as the final boss, in fact) in the trilogy of Demon novels. Now I'm not saying they're great reading, even by shitty RP tie-in novel standards, but that is "something that was released at all" that ties in.

So they probably went "Oh hey, yeah, that's right, someone wrote that setting. I guess we need to include Demon. What even happens in that?" then dug through their stuff until they found the novels, skimmed them, then assumed that covered everything.

And then the End of Evangelion happens (not a summary or a joke, that is literally the ending).

Complete with giant Rei? I would be okay with running that, even putting Komm, süsser Tod on in the background to really drive the point home.

[hyzmarca]

Demon at least avoided heavy Christian repentance. Two of the three prompts given for what God has been doing all this time are that God committed suicide and that he just ragequit and abandoned the universe to go off somewhere and make a better one.

On the other hand, every scenario in Gehenna had a heavy repentance theme. Nightshade starts off well enough, with a vampire hit squad fighting a sewer kaiju in the middle of New York and the whole thing being broadcast live by CNN. "Vampire superheroes save New York from giant monster" is probably one of the better ways the Masquerade could break. But it ends with the PCs as a passive observer as Saulot willingly submits himself to God's Judgment, and all the other Antediluvian are smote by an angel.

And Crucible of God has the PCs acting as a channel for God's power, but only if they submit and successfully make some humanity rolls, otherwise Tzimisce jusat eats them.

Even Fair is Foul is ultimately about repentance and redemption. Which isn't a bad theme, it's just way too heavy in the book.

[Prak]

Prak: an Earthbound features heavily (as the final boss, in fact) in the trilogy of Demon novels. Now I'm not saying they're great reading, even by shitty RP tie-in novel standards, but that is "something that was released at all" that ties in.

They weren't terrible novels. I don't remember the Earthbound, but I read them about a decade ago, so I only remember a few things.

Demon at least avoided heavy Christian repentance. Two of the three prompts given for what God has been doing all this time are that God committed suicide and that he just ragequit and abandoned the universe to go off somewhere and make a better one.

This is true, astonishingly enough. There is some amount of repentance in DtF, but it very much supports the choice of telling God to fuck off.

[Koumei]

I also only read them a decade ago, but the big bad was a giant tree Earthbound, with a whole weird cult forming around it. Including a lot of weird and uncomfortable sexual elements (because White Wolf). There was another villainous one who was the (adopted?) child of a priest, blackmailing him over an affair.

The "heroes" included a guy who was shot in the head by gangsters over a debt (I think he was also one of the actual sample characters in the rulebook?) and a lady demon who abducted an attempted burglar and tortured him for several weeks until she could generate faith from him.

Overall they weren't well-written, and the sexual stuff just seemed kind of "forced because White Wolf is edgelords" and unpleasant to read.

[Prak]

Definitely. Though I did like the main protagonist demon (the guy who was shot in the head). But then I was also 18, so maybe if I read them again I'd hate him.